Reaching Peak Kleptocapitalism

As Max Ibanez says, “This is the final result of unfettered capitalism. It’s the fascist state at its ideal. Unlimited labor willing to kill each other for the opportunity to mow lawns and scrub barnacles off yachts. How do you get unlimited labor? Get the priests and conservatives to resist contraceptives. Be careful you unwashed masses … if you start waking up, they’ll start wars for you to die in. Or they may just say fuck it and start bombing you right at home.”

Benito Trump as Night Falls in America

From the first moment he began to peddle outrageous and obvious lies about the president’s birth, the American corporate media has winked at Donald “Benito” Trump, joked with Trump, spotlighted Trump and promoted Trump.

What it has not done is the only thing it should have done, which is to expose Trump as the unhinged fascist fraud he is.

And if Trump becomes the banana republic dictator of the United States, we’ll have the American corporate news media to thank for it. I have never been more disgusted with these amoral prostitutes who pose as “professionals.”

Trump is a narcissistic sociopath utterly without empathy, a man who sees nothing else in the world but mirrors. He understands how people feel when he hurts them about as well as he understands ancient Greek.

Anyone who ever entertained the idea that Donald J. Trump was even minimally acceptable as a presidential candidate is so profoundly stupid that I’m a little surprised their autonomic nervous system is actually smart enough to permit them to breathe. And the funny thing is, the other Republican presidential candidates were all just about as bad.

Trump supporters are now nothing but a mob screaming “n*gger” and “beaner!” to promote a fascist dictatorship. Whether or not they’re smart enough to realize it, they’ve become evil.

But these hideous people didn’t spring from nowhere, nor did they arrive without cause.

“I’m saying that the landscape I just saw in west central Florida, whose inhabitants crawl mollusk-like from fast-food outlets to convenience stores to healthcare providers to office parks, in their SUVs and pickup trucks with tinted windows, is a landscape of cognitive dissonance and collective delusion,” Andrew O’Hehir wrote. “It’s the landscape of madness in general, and the flavor of madness provided by Donald Trump in particular.”

Trump is tapping displaced, scapegoated anger, and anger always springs from fear — in this case, the deep economic anxiety of the dying American middle class. The Democrats have got to start addressing that problem openly and directly.

Because it’s not morning in America anymore. It’s twilight.

The Angel of Iron Man's Better Nature

For his first nine appearances, Iron Man sported powerful-looking but bulky, robot-like armor. In Tales of Suspense 48 (Dec. 1963), he got an upgrade to a lighter, more flexible red-and-gold armor.

The superheroic-looking armor was impressive, but the issue’s voodoo-ish villain, “Mister Doll,” not so much. The next issue, however, would be one of my favorites.

In Tales of Suspense 49 (Jan. 1964), Iron Man would use his new armor to withstand a nuclear explosion and rescue a member of the X-Men, the new team fighting the Blob in their third issue that same month.

“Oh, it makes perfect sense that Stan (Lee) would want to showcase his new title in another book and market them a bit more,” comics historian Don Alsafi noted. “But ... the Angel? I know the X-Men has only been around for a couple of issues so far, and hasn't had much of a chance to really develop the characters — and yet, the Angel isn’t the team member I would have thought to be most appealing or interesting. Really, in a setting as weird and wondrous as the Marvel world has rapidly become, the ability to fly is as unremarkable of a power as ... well, the ability to shrink. (Note that characters such as the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner and Iron Man all possess the power of flight, and in ways that are completely secondary to their main abilities.)”

Deranged by that all-purpose plot device radiation, the Angel embarks on a rampage that Iron Man halts with a particularly heroic strategy. Deliberately letting his boot jets flame out, Iron Man falls back toward earth into a fatal dive, reasoning that his plight will snap the Angel back to his normally heroic personality.

As when Daredevil fought the Sub-Mariner, this was another innovative example of a Marvel hero achieving a victory by “losing.” Tony Stark risked his life for someone who was essentially a stranger in a gamble that paid off.

I’m not sure 21^st century audiences, long since jaded by the Lord of the Flies ethics of “reality TV,” would buy a superhero that altruistic. But it impressed the hell out of me when I was 9.

Let's Give the Republicans Another Shot

One political party impeached the president who put the U.S. into surplus, then used its Supreme Court to install a president who tortured people, started two failed wars, ran up unprecedented debt and crashed the world economy through his refusal to impose financial regulation, then fought tooth and nail against the president who tried to clean up their unholy mess, then ruined the U.S. credit rating by threatening to default on the national debt it ran up. Oh, and they let New Orleans drown. Now they're offering as president a racist reality show doofus who wonders why we can't just start launching nuclear attacks around the world.

What the hell. Let's give 'em another shot! Whaddya say?

Out of the Shadow of the Superhero

Comic books, like television, are a generally conservative entertainment medium, reflecting social change only after it’s taken hold in the culture at large. That makes it interesting to track the course of women’s rights in comics from the 1940s into the second decade of the 21^st century.

Mary Marvel, Bulletgirl, Miss America, Namora, Golden Girl, Doll Girl, Batwoman, Batgirl, Supergirl, Superwoman, Aquagirl, Miss Arrowette, Fly Girl, Hawkgirl, Power Girl, Ms. Marvel, Spider-Woman, even She-Hulk … the female knock-off version of the dominant male superhero was a venerable tradition, one that paradoxically paralleled American society’s growing recognition of female power even as it kind of condescended to the idea.

Take Fly Girl, for example. Introduced in Adventures of the Fly 13 (July 1961) as a traditional damsel in distress, actress Kim Brand didn’t play that role for long. In Adventures of the Fly 14 (September 1961), she was granted a magic ring by extradimensional emissary Turan that enabled her to duplicate the powers of attorney Thomas Troy, the Fly. She co-starred with him thereafter while appearing in solo stories in the Archie comics Laugh and Pep.

The trend even continued outside comics, with Six Million Dollar Men spawning Bionic Women.

Those female copies sometimes served as guinea pigs, trial balloons for plot developments that would later be visited on the more established male hero. Supergirl was “killed” before Superman, and Batgirl was physically disabled before Batman.

The 1979 movie Alien featured a female lead besting a space predator after her male crewmates had failed. And Joss Whedon’s innovative 1997 TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer marked a shift in the culture, featuring a no-nonsense superheroine in the lead who had copied no one, and whose adventures balanced the traditionally male mission of monster hunting with traditional female concerns about high school relationships.

And the permanent cultural shift that has taken place is even more apparent now. Hawkgirl, for example, has effectively supplanted her former mentor Hawkman, and Thor’s original love interest, Jane Foster, gained the powers, the hammer and the status of the thunder god.

How One Handles Bullies

“Cowards need someone to pick on,” Robert Reich wrote. “I know that from personal experience. When I was a boy, I was smaller than the rest of the kids — and many times I was teased and taunted.

Michael Schwerner

“I remember summers in a small town in upstate New York, and I remember a boy who was a few years older than me, a boy named Mickey, who protected me from bullying and gave me some very precious advice. He told me that the bullies could not really hurt me if I was stronger inside than they were inside. He told me that brutish anger is no match for calm determination. And although he perished a decade later, his determination did, in the end, triumph. His full name was Michael Schwerner. He was murdered by a cowardly group of racists in June 1964 as he and James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, also murdered, tried to register voters in Mississippi.”

Those murderers’ moral heirs are still around, now supporting Trump so they can “take their country back” from all the people they don’t want voting.

The Shark Hunters of the GOP

If I had to describe the 21^st century Republican Party in one word, it would be “predatory.”

The GOP politicians like to throw beaten, bloodied-up minorities into the water like chum, hoping to lure in their stupid Great White Prey, whom they will then hang from hooks and butcher for their Social Security, Medicare and any other little thing of value they might have left.